A POLL last week showed people in Scotland still trust the SNP more than any other party to safeguard the NHS.

Jim Murphy must have needed his temperature taken when he saw that report.

Of course, Scots know that the NHS are under pressure everywhere, as populations age and the cost of new drugs soars.

They can see the difficulty faced by the Scottish Government, who are investing a record £12billion in the NHS, despite their own money being cut by 10 per cent by Westminster.

Of course, we all want things to be better – but few are convinced Labour would make a better fist of it.

The reason is simple: Labour’s record on the NHS is poor.

And much of the bad medicine being dispensed today by the Tories has its origins in the Labour years.

It was Labour who started privatisation in the NHS and the SNP who ended it in Scotland.

When Labour ran Scotland in 2005, they handed a subsidiary of the UK’s biggest private hospital provider, General Healthcare Group, contracts to operate out of Stracathro Hospital in Brechin. The SNP brought it back into the public sector.

It was Labour who introduced foundation hospitals in England, which were condemned by health unions and doctors who feared they would create a two-tier system.

But concerns were ignored and Labour signed the NHS concordat with the Independent Healthcare Association in November 2000, which stipulated the private sector should be considered alongside NHS bodies as potential providers of clinical services.

In 2004, the head of strategy in NHS England under Labour told the Financial Times the future of the NHS was really as a health insurer.

Private companies were brought in to build and run hospitals under the notorious PFI deals, which ended up costing taxpayers billions of pounds.

Even senior members of the party were horrified. Former health minister Frank Dobson said in 2004: “If this is not privatisation of the Health Service, then I don’t know what is.”

The New Labour politicians and advisers who started this process continued it when the Tories took over in 2010, often moving into the private sector themselves.

Tony Blair’s former adviser Simon Stevens went on to work for the multinational private healthcare firm UnitedHealth Group, whose HQ is in the US state of Minnesota.

Stevens, who started life as a Labour councillor in the London borough of Lambeth, was brought back by the Tories as chief executive of NHS England.